Ken Olisa |
Today Ken Olisa is officially named as the most powerful black person in Britain, not that any of the commuters on the 8.10am from Hampton Wick would know it. Unassuming and usually dressed in the commuter’s favoured uniform of suit and raincoat, the only thing that hints at his influence is his trademark bow tie – he owns more than 100.
Otherwise, there is little
to suggest that Mr. Olisa is, according to the annual Powerlist – which names
the most influential black people in Britain, more important than Sir Lenny
Henry or Mo Farah or the Oscar-winning film director Steve McQueen. How could
anyone know that this quiet man from Nottingham wields more power than Lewis
Hamilton or Baroness Lawrence?
But wield power Ken Olisa
does. The 63-year old was the first British born black man to serve on the
board of a public company (Reuters), has his own merchant bank (Restoration
Partners), and a library named after him at his Cambridge alma mater (Fitzwilliam).
He is a keen philanthropist (the library came after a £2 million donation), a
former governor of the Peabody Trust, a chair of not one but two charities
(Thames Reach, which deals with the homeless, and Shaw Trust, which helps the
disabled), and is on the board of the Institute of Directors.
And as if all of that
weren’t enough, in April, he was made Lord Lieutenant of London, appointed by
the Queen on the advice of the Prime Minister. The title gives him an office in
Whitehall, a staff of 90, and puts him in charge of all visits made by the
royal family within the city – with him even standing in for them on occasion.
So he escorted the Queen to
the Home Office last week, and had the miserable task of accompanying the Duke
and Duchess of Cambridge to the Spectre premiere last month, along with Prince
Harry. The next morning he was up early to spend yet more time with the Duchess
– this time, on a charity visit to Islington Town Hall.
“I do a lot of
calming down in the moments before their arrival,” he explains. “People tend to get very wound up and stressed.” Not
so Olisa, who is as cool as the proverbial cucumber, even when wearing the
heavy military-style uniform of the Lord Lieutenant.
“He hates the
idea of quotas, thinks that they humiliate the people that they are intended to
help”
All of this is a very long
way indeed from his humble beginnings in Nottingham, where he was brought up in
straitened circumstances by his single mother (he never knew his father, who
left them to return to Nigeria when he was young).
The loo was outside, and
the bath tub too. “I was probably one of the very few
black people in the entire district, one of the very few black people that
anyone had ever seen for that matter.” How did that feel?
“Well it just
felt like being a seven year old boy, really. There were trees to be climbed
and dams to be built. I remember someone asking me how I went to the toilet,
but I suspect a lot of people get asked those questions irrespective of what
they look like.”
He always refused to be
defined by the colour of his skin. At school his headmaster taught him that
everyone was equal, once handing all the children caviar on biscuits while
playing Mozart in the background – it was this kind of upbringing that taught
him the only limits were in his own head.
He got a scholarship to
Cambridge, where he studied Natural Sciences and fell in love with fellow
student, Julia, whom he has been
married to for 40 years and with whom he has two daughters and six
grandchildren.
Julia is white but when I
ask if they have ever experienced any prejudice his answer is a simple ‘no’. “It was Cambridge, quite enlightened. But we lived in America
as well [he went on to work for IBM there] and to the best of my knowledge we
didn’t experience much there either.”
“He thinks we
have always been a multicultural society – from the 25,000 Caribbean soldiers
who volunteered to fight for us during the Second World War to the Polish
pilots who took part in the Battle of Britain”
He hates the idea of
quotas, thinks that they humiliate the people that they are intended to help. “Because what happens is, a black man walks in to a meeting
and everyone thinks he got his job because he’s a black man, and not because he
is any good.” Has he encountered that attitude? “Oh yes, because we all tend to
stereotype. When a black bloke comes in people make assumptions, and he either
does or doesn’t challenge those assumptions.”
Olisa chose to challenge
those assumptions – assumptions that I would call racist but Olisa wouldn’t
because he point blank refuses to play the victim. “I’ve
met with lots of prejudice over time, but it’s mild prejudice, not the Klu Klux
Klan. I got into a lift at Fortnum and Mason a couple of years ago, and I am
looking like this,” he says, pointing at his suit.
“I probably had a
raincoat on, was carrying a briefcase, and she stepped back and tucked her
handbag towards her. I just thought ‘oh dear, poor lady. What on earth is going
through this woman’s mind? What a sad life she must live!’ So the answer is
yes, [I have encountered prejudice] but one mustn’t over play that, one mustn’t
behave like a victim. But I’ll spare you that rant this morning.”
Please don’t, I say. Does
he think we live in a culture of victimhood?
“Well I think
it’s in the interests of a lot of people to get others to feel downtrodden, so
that they can claim to come and raise them back up again.” Disaffected minorities seem
now to be a majority, but Olisa sees no reason for why this should be.
“This Powerlist,
it shows that black people can do everything. There can no longer be an
argument that if you can’t get on because you are black. There are lots of
other reasons you can’t get on – you’re incompetent, you can’t speak properly,
you can’t spell, you don’t get to work on time. But it’s not because you are
black.”
Yet he detests unfairness,
something that became apparent after a clash with the Speaker of the House of
Commons, John Bercow, back in 2011. Olisa had been appointed to the board of
the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA), the MPs watchdog,
after the expenses scandal.
This, he says, is the only
time he has felt victimised. “They [the MPs] appeared
to hate us [the board] viscerally. We were shouted at from the very first
meeting. It was absolutely dreadful. It didn’t matter what we proposed, because
there was very little interest in rational argument. MPs were saying that they
suddenly had to do things like sleep in their offices, which was just
nonsense.”
He stepped down when Bercow
announced that the board had to reapply for their jobs, with the Speaker being
accused of rigging the appointments in revenge for the crackdown on what MPs
could claim.
“I only met him
[Bercow] at the end and he said ‘I think you have done a creditable job under
very difficult circumstances, not helped, if I may say so Mr Olisa, by some of
the remarks you have made in the newspapers which demonstrate your lack of
understanding of parliamentary process’. I have to say I was
uncharacteristically speechless, as all I’d done was to say that they didn’t
have to sleep in their offices.”
He pauses and starts to
laugh. “But none of this was to do with me being black,
so that’s the good news.”
Does he think we will ever
have a black prime minister? Or a black member of the royal
family?
“There is no reason
why there shouldn’t be. There’s a Lord Lieutenant who isn’t white now. But he
thinks we have always been a multicultural society – from the 25,000 Caribbean
soldiers who volunteered to fight for us during the Second World War to the
Polish pilots who took part in the Battle of Britain – and he says we would do
well to remember that – especially in light of the Paris attacks and the recent
furore over refugees. Adjusting his bow
tie, the most British of symbols on the most British of men, he says: “We are a
philanthropic nation, and we are lucky to be one, lucky that people from
overseas have given their lives for us. We squander that at our peril.”
(guardian)
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